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I am curious of various perceptions that people have. I do not ask for general enjoyment (suspense, thrill, excitement, hype, adventure), or for meta-hatred for peculiarly bad films or disgust for gross ones.

I mean being moved during a film séance.

To spark it somehow, I have a tale of a dozen movies experiences; maybe in their variety they will remind you of some of your own: (Spoilers alert!)

1. It Happened One Night (1934) I felt high sympathy for the main character, so seeing him first leave with a head down and sad at the end and then have the "twist" happy ending was unusually satisfying

2. Gone With The Wind (1939) when the title crawl and Max Steiner's orchestration explained to me where does the name of the movie come from.😮 I didn't know I could cry in the first minute.

3. It's a Wonderful Life (1946) first a sympathy for the main character, then seeing him completely broke, broken and alone against the cold winter... -> then seeing him rescued by the community that he has been helping his entire life... 😭

5. Schindler's List (1993) The first time I watched this movie I cried during the ending scene with the survivors. The second time happened around a Christmas event at the university, for which I had a lottery-won free entrance card. I strolled past the big queue of people outside in the cold waiting to buy a ticket and entered through the gate for the free-entrance card holders. I had just a split-second moment of petty satisfaction with being in "the privileged group of people". And then I looked at my elegant black coat and at my leather winter gloves and compared it to a just-seen scene of those officers sitting at the table in the movie. I was disturbed for good 10 minutes by understanding how myself I could be susceptible like any other person to a "luxuriously convenient social segregation". Coming from Poland, I had lots of cultural experience with these topics already, including calling out other people on being judgmental without accounting for how "heroic" would they behave under horrible circumstances, but never knew my own weakness before.

6. Lion King (1994) Mufasa dying and the triumphant ending, thanks to Hans Zimmer. Till this day I cannot listen to this music casually in the background, because it drains me.

7. Mr. Holland's Opus (1995) Gradually seeing the man give up on his various dreams and wishes for the good of his family and his daily work was quite depressing and although he did get a consolation prize at the end in the form of gratitude...

8. Life is Beautiful (1997) Quite unusually maybe, I was moved mainly in the first part of the movie. I didn't know that having coincidences work for a character in such a sweet way was "allowed" in a story. The effect was charming.

9. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) hearing Nancy Sinatra and George Zamfir pieces was a very saddening experience for an 11-year old who was just curious of his dad's DVD with a hot chick and a sword on the cover...

10. UP (2009) A retro movie with zeppelins, a lost world, a collection of archaeological finds and artifacts and an elderly main character with a heartbreaking backstory, times the score, was something I long before gave up on even dreaming of. Very few people visit past eras in order to create a deep cinematic experience, so UP was like a moment of solace to me, surrounded every day by people, for whom 1990s film/music/literature is already prejudged as "too old to be of value", not to mention anything before that.

11. Watchmen (2009) The disenchanted, depressed and may I say "broken"? philosophy of the movie coupled with hearing The Sound of Silence for the first time, and likewise Cohen's original Halleluyah (yes, in that scene; I don't know what is funnier in retrospective: that, or the fact that till that day I though the song was an original composition for Shrek)

12. Midnight in Paris (2011) The lessons learned by the main character and the bitter-sweet ending left me in a certain melancholy ( I was spending the New Year's Eve alone)

13. The Wild Stories (2014) The frustration of seeing that businessman dying in a 1:1 "trade" against some dirty, brutal hillbilly who started and escalated the conflict left me deeply sad. Definitely not an example of the chivalric "right makes might".

Edit: As for Titanic, after I watched it as a 7-year old, more scared than sad, I have literally forgotten how to swim and had to be taught again. Till this day I cannot go to a seashore at night and hear-but-not-see the waves. The worst offender is this eerie moment:

Total nerd alert, but I got all misty-eyed in the final scene of DH2, as well. Knowing that this particular journey was coming to an end - coupled with the obvious but insanely effective reprise of Leaving Hogwarts - was enough to get me all choked up, and that doesn't happen easily for me.

I've never cried while watching Titanic, but I do always finish the film with a certain sense of melancholic reflectiveness. The score, the lost love, the morning fascination of the all-too-real images of the ship's final somber resting place...yep, that'll do it.

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Amour (2012) - That movie crushed my soul. But in a good way. I felt numb, as if I had been bludgeoned. I highly recommend people to seek this movie out. I saw it on the big screen, staring at it in awe, literally incredulous at what I was watching but still the movie made me cry within the first 10 minutes.

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The Lord of the Rings. Moments in all three entries get me going, but where Fellowship of the Ring and the Two Towers have only a handful of those, Return of the King has like twenty of them. Some moments in The Desolation of Smaug (the beholding of the mountain, the hidden door opening, the dead refugees revealed) and The Battle of the Five Armies (Thorin’s death) also get me.

Braveheart.

Schindler’s List.

Titanic.

Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises, in a few moments.

The Lion King - possibly when I was younger, I don’t remember. Same goes for E.T.

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A.I. is the one where I cried the most (ending scene). Empire of the Sun also hit hard although I'm not sure if I quite got to crying. I probably got a little misty-eyed during the final sequences of TFA as well (joy tinged with melancholy).

Titanic was pretty gripping and devastating but I don't think I cried at all. To some degree I think the shock/trauma factor of that film's final third outweighed the almost perfectly tragic romance.

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Kind of weird but the only film that brought me to tears in the theatre was First Man. Something about the timing of when I went to see it, the music in the scene, and the significance of the scene just broke me.

The Lord of the Rings has many moments that give me the chills. Return of the King at Aragorn's coronation is the tipping point for me.

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That is irrelevant. The ending is not emotionally touching for me in the least. I've told the story many times how the projector malfunctioned when the alien was talking to David and we all groaned and suffered through an even longer ending.

I have forgotten to mention this one on my list. Till the last couple of minutes I kept asking myself "ok, how do they get out?" -> "ok, how will they be gotten out?" -> "Ok Kubrick, what do you mean to..." -> "Oh...."

I am surprised how many mention The Return of The King... but maybe that is because I really do not like this film. On paper it has all triggers necessary for "and now you cry". I do remember though the first time I heard "You bow to no-one" -> 🎻🎻🎻

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This is a weird thing to admit (a phrase I should put before most of my posts), but I was sobbing practically uncontrollably for at least 5 minutes after Life Itself, the documentary about Roger Ebert and his final years, ended. It had a very serious and unique emotional effect on me.

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Kind of weird but the only film that brought me to tears in the theatre was First Man. Something about the timing of when I went to see it, the music in the scene, and the significance of the scene just broke me.

The Lord of the Rings has many moments that give me the chills. Return of the King at Aragorn's coronation is the tipping point for me

Once that movie gets past the 40 minute mark, I get a solid cry every 20 minutes or so. It is a bit excessive in comparison to TTT's slow build-up to the Gandalf reveal/Sam's speech but it works so well.

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1. Jackson's battle "genius". I already had a problem with Helm's Deep vertical charge, but seeing The Battle on Pelennor Fields taking place in an empty map editor instead of any plausible scenery, the completely retarded suicide of knights in a charge against ruins full of archers, finally disappearing horses before Black Gate and utter tactical nonsense on the part of the Men of the West... I love both The Fellowship (could stand on it's own if other films didn't get made) and The Two Towers (Rohan feels human and populated by humans, including interesting human heroes) partly also because they were largely spared such dumb sequences.

2. The world-building-breaking (OP) ghosts and how inconsistently they are used.

3. Frodo's chronic drama and distrust towards Sam, unpredictably hideous/attention hore Gollum Binks and the grey, boring scenery. this felt like TV soap opera episodes to me. I skipped all of their scenes on DVD every time I watched it since I was a kid (I likewise skipped their parts in the books) Now: I am not all saccharine, I love the mines/tomb of Moria sequences for example, or the savage onslaught of Uruk-hai in the rain, but the "oooh someone is going crazy, oooh so ambiguous" type of story just makes me want to punch 2 out of 3 characters on screen in their faces, possibly using the third one's frying pan.

4. Denethor the wimp, the crazy. "Gondor is mein!", trying to burn Faramir alive like a lunatic, close-ups on him eating (gross!) and every other whiny scene he is in (and these are many). He is not unlike a later character "funnier than they ever had"—Alfred.

Now let's just skip these parts and salvage what is left. There are still problems:

5. The treatment of Theoden, Saruman and Faramir—some of my favorite characters.

*Saruman instead of the ending in Shire gets... an omission (or that "trololo death"). No wonder Christopher Lee was offended.

*Theoden goes out like a bicz, like a "really unlucky dude" picked by a flying monster from amongst several thousand horsemen; when compared to the book version, and in comparison to Theoden from The Two Towers he meets an end as worthy as did Count Dooku in ROTS.

*Finally Faramir and Eowyn could have wonderful scenes together, the real romance subplot of the series. But nah.

6. The loooong ending. I would gladly skip half of the festivities and pillow fights in favor of a neat return to the Shire, confronting Saruman and a said Faramir & Eowyn ending.

There are some things in this film that I do enjoy (the music, Theoden's speech, Aragorn's speeches and coronation, lighting of the beacons, Mount Doom scenery, Eomer's/Eowyn's/Legolas' fight against the oliphaunts... (although... do you remember Gimli teleporting to the place that Legolas rode the oliphaunt to? "Dwarves are natural sprinters", I guess...)

But just look at the Oscar overhype coupled with puzzling whining at The Two Towers. There is some dissonance that gets refreshed every time this movie is brought up.

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I forgot The Fly and Dead Ringers. These two movies, especially the latter, absolutely destroyed me emotionally! Only when I watched them a second time.

You choices are eye opening in the fact that emotionally touch doesn't mean you have to cry. I didn't cry in the Exorcist but the empathy the film evoked was gut churning in how Ellen Burnstyn character was so helpless in her ability to stop what was happening to Regan. The same with the Fly (I assume you meant Goldblum's) in my case Price's version. The stunning horror at the end when he screams help me HEELLP MEEE is visceral. People laugh nervously as if that is funny but its not funny its horrifying. It evokes many fears of change, suffering, being eaten alive, and death, death being a sweet release.